IMAGINATIVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE - THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE PRESENT - CHAPTER V

There was in fact an attempt to resize in quotation marks, with all the euphemism that this means, the role of the State in societies. But not as an ideological objective, but as a kind of technocratic eagerness: to turn the management of societies, which is up to the States, into more or less predictable and technical mechanisms, rather than into political situations or procedures.

So that's where that kind of political blurring comes in. We are beginning to consider the possibility of managing societies, without considering that politics is always there, because politics is, let's say, the alpha and omega of conflict and human conflict is always going to be there.

What they call neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus ended up believing almost in the Marxist utopia of a society without conflict.

We have already reached a kind of plain that threatens even the liberal principles themselves, and that is why I do not believe that it has been basically a question of neoliberalism, because the axiom on which the idea of modern liberalism works is the idea of pluralism, of differences and, therefore, of conflicts.

There were a number of elements that had to do with measures that actually reduced State action in certain areas, particularly the economic sphere, but at the same time there was a kind of technocratic impetus. The utopian fantasy that we are going to reduce the scope of human conflict to a kind of perpetual peace and then we will be happy and what we have left is carpentry, social engineering.

Then the prevalence of the market emerges, because given the discredit of the political, therefore of the handling of the public (and the role of corruption in its discredit is not negligible), and the emergence of the managerial as a paradigm of efficiency (and the managerial refers to the technocratic), and when this phenomenon is erected as a functional exaltation of the times, on the one hand, and on the other hand because it is the engine of the production of dazzling goods and services as objects of consumption, the market wins a battle against an inefficient State.

And here are two things dear friends. First, the issue that the market is complicated because we tend to associate the idea of satisfaction with the idea of need and, in reality, needs have nothing to do with the market.

That is to say, what is never satisfied are needs, because we do not know what that is, we do not know what is necessary, we do not think of our life in terms of what is necessary, but we think of it in terms of the superfluous, permanently.

Therefore, the concept of need varies fundamentally and the market operates simply on the basis of desire rather than need.

What makes it impenetrable, and that no system in the 20th century has been able to attack market practices, is that it is aimed at the satisfaction of desire, and that is undoubtedly the most humane thing there is, the deepest thing.

So, we are subject to some collective logics, but for which nobody can be held responsible, because precisely because they are collective they are also impersonal and this causes great anguish from the political point of view, when you look at the crises of the political struggle that was generated in the twentieth century: fascism, communism, and market economies, what you find there is a great discussion, not explicit, but very profound, about how much the societies are going to allow the desires to be manifested, to materialize, to expand.

The big question is, what is freedom? Is this precisely what it is about? Are we going to allow desires to organize the world or are we going to organize the world and give it the space that we rationally consider should have the satisfaction of desires? Deep down, it's the big drama.

But, in a consumer society, is man free to desire or is he induced to desire certain options? He wants wildly and he wants the most incredible things. I mean, the wish list is by definition infinite. In other words, the interesting thing about desire is that it is infinite, uncollectible, there is always dissatisfaction. That is why the market economy triumphs over socialism.

Socialism is not that it forces you to have a reality full of hardships, because in capitalism you can also have them, what happens is that it denies you the possibility of thinking about a different reality, of wanting it. I mean, it keeps you from wishing, it's built so you don't want it anymore. So, that is fatal to any system or collective order.

Let's say that the market has ideologically succeeded and in fact penetrated into politics. In other words, advertising, which is what fundamentally makes us recreate and increase our desires, has expanded to such an extent that the political is permeated by the advertising.